The Madwoman Who Called on My Wedding Day

She was calling, she said,from the bowels of a libraryon a college campus where shehid each night and slept among thestacks. She'd been living that wayfor years, moving on when she wasdiscovered to someplace elsewhere she would blend inwith the scenery and passundetected among the young.

I heard her out. She'd reached my nameafter running through the directory,alphabetically. Apparently no one in thea's or b's or any of the c's before mehad done so. It was a strange tale shetold, how she'd been cheated of her inheritance—money her father had left her—by a trustee, distant and cold,far off in California. She said she had no money tolive on, or even fight with, because of him.

I called the fellow, a reasonable sort.He thanked me for my concern andthe attention I'd given his ward,but he said she was off her drugs,the police had been alerted.They knew she'd come East andwere looking for her but they hadn'tfound her yet. There were too manylibraries for her to hide in, in thisCity of Books, a place such as Borgesimagined where for every

rational line there were rows of senselesscacophony, a library that was the universe,the librarians in suicidal despair.

I rolled over in bed to answer the phone andheard her voice again, more desperate than before.They were closing in, couldn't I help? She asked.What had the trustee said? She wouldn't saywhere she was—perhaps I'd turn her in.

I don't recall exactly what I told her other thanto say I couldn't help her that day;another woman —the one who wouldbecome my wife— was waiting for me in a church.She was not the sort who'd tolerate a groomwho'd dare to show up late to his wedding and hers,and so I demurred. You'll have to try thenext name on the list, I said.

But you're the only one who's talked to me yet,she said, and those words rang in my headlike overtones of plainsong, Gregorian chantechoing in the chancel up to the apse,as I repeated my vows, facing the lightstreaming through a stained-glass windowthinking of her disordered mind, which kepther running as I prepared to settle down.